The Vision Sciences Society is honored to present Gerald Westheimer with the 2021 Ken Nakayama Medal for Excellence in Vision Science.

The Ken Nakayama Medal is in honor of Professor Ken Nakayama’s contributions to the Vision Sciences Society, as well as his innovations and excellence to the domain of vision sciences.

The recipient of the Ken Nakayama Medal receives this honor for high-impact work that has made a lasting contribution in vision science in the broadest sense. The nature of this work can be fundamental, clinical or applied.

Gerald Westheimer

Gerald Westheimer received his PhD degree in Physics: Physiological Optics at Ohio State under Glenn Fry in 1953 after completing optometry studies at the Sydney Technical College, a B.Sc. in mathematics and physiology at the University of Sydney and several years of private practice in Sydney, Australia. His post-doctoral education included the Nerve-Muscle Program at Woods Hole under Steven Kuffler, and a year at the Cambridge Physiological Laboratory, where he collaborated with Fergus Campbell and John Robson on the eye’s accommodative mechanism and attended E.H. Linfoot’s course on Fourier optics. After teaching optics and vision science in the optometry schools successively of Houston, Ohio State and Berkeley he was appointed as Professor of Physiology in Berkeley in 1967 and, when the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology was formed in 1987, as founding Head of its Division of Neurobiology. In 1994 he became Professor of the Graduate School at Berkeley as well as adjunct professor in the Laboratory of Neurobiology at the Rockefeller University, New York.

There are few facets of the visual system that Gerald Westheimer has not been involved in during his long career as active experimentalist, theoretician, scholar of the history of vision science, laboratory head, mentor and sponsor of independent research by post-doctoral and visiting scholars from around the world. His recognitions include election to the Royal Society of London and its Ferrier Lecture, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Science, Honorary Member of the Royal Society of NSW, the Tillyer Medal of the Optical Society, Proctor Medal of ARVO, Prentice Medal of the American Academy of Optometry, International von Sallman Prize in Ophthalmology, Barry Collins Medal of the Australian Optometric Association, Glenn Fry Medal of Ohio State University, several honorary degrees and Membership of the Order of Australia.

From his experiences in the optometry clinic Gerald formed an abiding interest in the eye’s optics and image formation, resolution and acuity. This led to his progressively deeper fascination with in the spatial sense of the eye in two and three dimensions, stereopsis and ocular motility. He used the research methodologies of optics, psychophysics, alert primate single unit recordings and right from their advent in the 1950’s, electronic computers. Rigorous training in mathematics and physics in Sydney enabled him to engage in the areas of systems theory and Fourier optics as they emerged, and to pioneer their application in visual science. Motivated primarily by an interest in and curiosity about human vision rather than the practice of particular scientific disciplines, Gerald concluded that, much as the analysis of visual phenomena should proceed initially by applying the knowledge and principles of the physical sciences, full understanding cannot be reached solely through that route but needs guidance from knowledge derived from observers’ awareness. With this approach, he made seminal discoveries in understanding the optics of the eye, binocular vision, spatial vision, eye-movements, learning and visual illusions. One example of his many contributions is his discovery how humans are able to discern small changes in the relative position of a stimulus that are an order of magnitude smaller than the smallest foveal cones in the retina. He termed this remarkable ability “hyperacuity” – a term that is now widely used, and elucidated many of its properties. In this, and in many other ways he shaped the growth of vision research. Vision science has benefited in lasting ways from Gerald’s research discoveries, his acumen, his scientific rigor, and his commitment to getting it right.

Dr. Westheimer will speak during the Awards session,
Sunday, May 23, 2021, 2:30 – 3:30 pm EDT.

The Vision Sciences Society is honored to present Dr. Marisa Carrasco with the 2021 Davida Teller Award

VSS established the Davida Teller Award in 2013. Davida was an exceptional scientist, mentor and colleague, who for many years led the field of visual development. The award is therefore given to an outstanding female vision scientist in recognition of her exceptional, lasting contributions to the field of vision science.

Marisa Carrasco

Julius Silver Professor of Psychology and Neural Science,  New York University

Marisa Carrasco investigates visual perception and attention, using human psychophysics, neuroimaging, neurostimulation, and computational modeling in order to study the relation between the psychological and neural mechanisms involved in these processes. Her research has revealed how attention modulates perceptual performance and alters appearance in a variety of visual tasks. Marisa grew up in Mexico City and earned her Licentiate in Psychology, specializing in experimental psychology, from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), where she graduated summa cum laude. Marisa then obtained her MS and PhD in psychology, specializing in cognition and perception, from Princeton University, where she received the highest scholarly excellence award, the Jacobus Honorific Fellowship. She became an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Wesleyan University in 1989. While at Wesleyan Dr. Carrasco received an NSF Young Investigator Award and an American Association of University Women Fellowship. She joined NYU in 1995 as an Associate Professor and was promoted to Professor of Psychology and Neural Science in 2002. She served as chair of the NYU Psychology Department from 2001-2007. NIH and NSF have continuously supported Carrasco’s research at NYU. Professor Carrasco received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Cattell Fellowship and was named a fellow of the American Psychological Society and has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences (2021); at NYU, she has been Collegiate Professor since 2007 and was named Julius Silver Professor of Psychology and Neural Science in 2019. Among her many other contributions to the vision sciences community, Marisa Carrasco has served as president of both the Vision Sciences Society and the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness and as a senior editor of two scientific journals, Journal of Vision and Vision Research.

Marisa Carrasco has had a profound impact on the field of vision science and attention through her multi-disciplinary research and through her mentorship activity. She is well-known as a dedicated teacher and mentor of undergraduate students, graduate students and post-doctoral fellows. This is in part evidenced by her receipt of the NYU award for excellence in postdoc mentoring in 2018.

Marisa forged her research career in an era when the field of vision science had few women. Through her efforts she not only advanced her own research; she has also been an invaluable and generous role model for the many students she has taught and mentored through the years. With this award, VSS recognizes Professor Marisa Carrasco’s outstanding research and thanks her for being a wonderful scientist, mentor, and colleague.

Dr. Carrasco will speak during the Awards session,
Sunday, May 23, 2021, 2:30 – 3:30 pm EDT.

Each year VSS endeavors to support travel to and accommodation at the annual meeting through a travel grants program, subject to availability of funding. For 2025, we are pleased to announce funding from Elsevier/Vision Research, NIH/National Eye Institute and NSF. In addition, in 2022 VSS introduced the John I. Yellott Travel Award.

Guidelines for Applications

Travel grants are available to both US and non-US individuals and are open to Undergraduates, Post-bac researchers, Graduate Students and Postdocs.

Eligibility criteria are as follows:

NEI Travel Grant: Undergraduate students, Graduate students, and Postdocs. Must be US citizen or permanent resident in the US.

Elsevier/Vision Research International Travel Award: Graduate students, Postdocs. Must NOT be US citizen or permanent resident of the US.

Yellott Award: Graduate students, Postdocs. Any citizenship or residency.

NSF Undergraduate Travel Award: Undergraduate students. Must be US citizen or permanent resident in the US. These grants are available to undergraduates who are the first author on a regular submitted abstract or who intend to submit an undergraduate just-in-time poster submission.

Undergraduate Travel Award: Undergraduate students. Any citizenship or residency. VSS members may donate to the Undergraduate Travel Award fund.

Travel grants are intended to increase the participation of people from diverse backgrounds, including those from underrepresented groups and individuals facing significant financial obstacles to their attendance.  For NEI travel grants (US citizens and permanent residents), diversity will be evaluated based on NIH criteria.  For Elsevier/Vision Research International Travel Awards (not US citizens or permanent residents of the US), diversity will be evaluated taking account of the international context.

All applications will be evaluated on a balance of criteria, including scientific quality of the submitted abstract, financial need, and diversity.

Applicants must be the first author on an abstract at the 2025 meeting. Previous VSS travel award recipients are not eligible (2020 and 2021 award recipients excluded). 

Grants Selection

Applications will be reviewed by a committee appointed by the VSS Board of Directors.

Schedule

Intent to Submit Application (during abstract submissions): December 5, 2024
Applications Open: January 6, 2025 
Deadline to Apply: January 24, 2025 
Recipients Announced: February 21, 2025 

The Vision Sciences Society is honored to present Timothy Brady with the 2020 Young Investigator Award.

The Young Investigator Award is an award given to an early stage researcher who has already made a significant contribution to our field. The award is sponsored by Elsevier, and the awardee is invited to submit a review paper to Vision Research highlighting this contribution.

Timothy Brady

Assistant Professor
Department of Psychology
University of California, San Diego

The 2020 Elsevier/VSS Young Investigator Award goes to Professor Timothy Brady for his fundamental contributions to the scientific study of visual memory. Tim Brady is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Psychology, UCSD. After completing his undergraduate degree in Cognitive Science at Yale University, Prof Brady did his PhD with Aude Oliva at MIT and then post-doctoral research with George Alvarez at Harvard University.

Prof Brady uses a combination of behavioral methods, cognitive neuroscience techniques and computational modelling to probe representations in the visual system and the processes by which visual information is encoded in working memory and integrated into long-term
storage. He has made numerous surprising discoveries about the extreme fidelity and detail of visual long-term memories for objects and scenes, and has demonstrated how statistical learning and ensemble encoding of features facilitates the maintenance and storage of complex stimuli like natural scenes. Prof Brady’s work has helped broaden the study of working memory to include richer, more naturalistic stimuli, and repeatedly challenged long-standing assumptions about the nature of visual representations. In a series of highly-cited studies he has shown how remembered objects are stored as groups of distinct parts that can be independently forgotten, and that when multiple items must be remembered, the brain computes summary statistics across the group. Prof Brady is not only a gifted and productive experimentalist—he has also made substantial contributions to the theoretical understanding of visual memory representations through computational modelling, as well as providing numerous useful tools for the community.

The nature of visual memory

Professor Brady will speak during the Awards session,
Saturday, May 22, 2021, 4:30 – 5:30 pm EDT.

In the real world, objects are discrete physical entities – your coffee mug either is or is not in your hand. As a result, both in everyday life and in memory research, there is a tendency to use a physical metaphor to understand memory: people tend to think of an object they are trying to remember as either in mind or not in their mind, and to say that we hold items in mind, as we hold real objects in our hand. This metaphor serves as a core mental model used in most conceptions of memory: all-or-none, discrete, and functioning at the level of entire objects or other discrete representations or chunks. In this brief talk, I’ll argue for a new way of thinking about memory that strongly contrasts with this common and intuitive view. I’ll show that individuated items are far from the only kind of representation people form, and that it is necessary to consider interactions among an entire hierarchy of representations (from semantic knowledge to ensemble information, chunks and items) to understand memory even for a single item. Next, I’ll show that memory representations, even for single items, are population-based and continuous in strength. Altogether, I’ll argue that even for those interested in cognition, analogies from neuroscience — with population codes, hierarchical representations and noisy signals — best allow us to understand memory limits, rather than physical analogies about discrete items.

The Vision Sciences Society is honored to present Dr. Marlene Behrmann with the 2020 Davida Teller Award

VSS established the Davida Teller Award in 2013. Davida was an exceptional scientist, mentor and colleague, who for many years led the field of visual development. The award is therefore given to an outstanding female vision scientist in recognition of her exceptional, lasting contributions to the field of vision science.

Marlene Behrmann

University Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, Carnegie Mellon University
Marlene Behrmann received her B.A. in Speech and Hearing Therapy in 1981, followed by her M.A. in Speech Pathology in 1984, both from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. She then obtained a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Toronto in 1991. She was a Research Scientist at the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto before moving to Carnegie Mellon University in 1993, where she is currently a University Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience. Dr. Behrmann was elected a member of the Society for Experimental Psychologists in 2008, inducted into the National Academy of Sciences in 2015, and into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019. Her prior recognitions include the Presidential Early Career in Science and Engineering and the Fred Kavli Distinguished Career Contributions in Cognitive Neurosciences Award.

Dr. Behrmann is a trailblazer and a world leader in the field of visual cognition. Her work represents the best of cognitive neuroscience, seamlessly blending insights gained from neuropsychology, modeling, cutting-edge functional and structural brain imaging, and behavioral experiments. She has made major contributions across a wide range of topics, including attention, the neural basis of autism, specialization between hemispheres in the brain, face recognition and disorders of face recognition, visual object recognition, word recognition, and visual imagery. Dr. Behrman’s work is characterized by her remarkable ability to examine an issue rigorously from many vantage points, and from there to develop, test, and refine theories of how a given behavior arises from the underlying brain function. In addition, she has an exceptional record of mentorship throughout her career in promoting and supporting students at all stages. Dr. Behrmann embodies the characteristics that we so admired in Davida Teller, and it is with pride that the Society recognizes her accomplishments through the Davida Teller Award.

Hemispheric organization and pattern recognition

Dr. Behrmann will speak during the Awards session,
Saturday, May 22, 2021, 4:30 – 5:30 pm EDT.
Despite the overall similarity in structure, the two hemispheres of the human brain have somewhat different functions. A traditional view of hemispheric organization asserts that there are independent and largely lateralized domain-specific visual regions in ventral occipitotemporal, specialized, if not dedicated, and perhaps innate, for the recognition of distinct classes of objects such as words and faces. In this talk, I will offer an alternative account of the organization of the hemispheres. I will present an account of interactive and graded organization of both within- and between-hemisphere organization. The crux of the account is that mature hemispheric organization emerges from a competitive and collaborative dynamic in which in right-handers, during the acquisition of literacy, word recognition comes to be co-localized with language lateralization in the left hemisphere. Consequently, face recognition is shifted, albeit not entirely, to the right hemisphere. Behavioral and imaging data from adults and over development will provide evidence to support this hypothesis of graded asymmetry.
Last, I will show that this pattern of organization is malleable and that, in children who have had a unilateral posterior cortical resection, the preserved hemisphere can subserve both word and face recognition. Together, these findings support a dynamic interactive process by which hemispheric organization emerges and unfolds with experience.

The Vision Sciences Society is honored to present Edward Adelson with the 2020 Ken Nakayama Medal for Excellence in Vision Science.

The Ken Nakayama Medal is in honor of Professor Ken Nakayama’s contributions to the Vision Sciences Society, as well as his innovations and excellence to the domain of vision sciences.

The recipient of the Ken Nakayama Medal receives this honor for high-impact work that has made a lasting contribution in vision science in the broadest sense. The nature of this work can be fundamental, clinical or applied.

Edward ‘Ted’ Adelson

John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Vision Science, MIT

Edward ‘Ted’ Adelson received his B.A. in Physics & Philosophy in 1974 from Yale University, followed by a PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University of Michigan (1979). After a postdoctoral position at NYU he became a research scientist at RCA labs. Ted then joined the faculty at MIT in 1987, first in the Media Lab, before moving to the department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences in 1994. Currently, Ted is the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Vision Science at MIT, in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). Ted has received many prior awards and is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Over his career Ted has made fundamental and wide-ranging contributions to the scientific study of vision and perception. His work is the stuff of textbooks and perception courses, and the illusions he has discovered have inspired and beguiled researchers and the general public alike. Indeed, Ted is able to bring visual phenomena to a highly purified state, so that his demonstrations will remain standard references for generations to come. More generally, Ted’s work bridges across the full range of vision science, and includes seminal contributions to theory, psychophysics, computational modelling, and neurophysiology. From low-level mechanisms of retinal adaptation, to the motion energy model, texture processing, lightness perception, pyramid decompositions, the plenoptic function, ‘things’ vs ‘stuff’ and material perception, practically everything Ted has done has opened new avenues of investigation and understanding in ways that have helped define the field. He is also known as an amazing supervisor, and many of his trainees have themselves gone on to make fundamental contributions to our understanding of vision. Ted Adelson easily meets, several times over, the Nakayama Award’s criterion of having made exceptional, lasting contributions to vision science.

Dr. Adelson will speak during the Awards session,
Saturday, May 22, 2021, 4:30 – 5:30 pm EDT.

The Vision Sciences Society is honored to present Talia Konkle with the 2019 Young Investigator Award.

The Young Investigator Award is an award given to an early stage researcher who has already made a significant contribution to our field. The award is sponsored by Elsevier, and the awardee is invited to submit a review paper to Vision Research highlighting this contribution.

Talia Konkle

Assistant Professor
Department of Psychology
Harvard University

Talia Konkle earned Bachelor degrees in applied mathematics and in cognitive science at the University of California, Berkeley.  Under the direction of Aude Oliva, she earned a PhD in Brain & Cognitive Science at MIT in 2011. Following exceptionally productive years as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychology at Harvard and at the University of Trento, in 2015, Dr. Konkle assumed a faculty position in the Department of Psychology & Center for Brain Science at Harvard.

Dr. Konkle’s research to understand how our visual system organizes knowledge of objects, actions, and scenes combines elegant behavioral methods with modern analysis of brain activity and cutting-edge computational theories. Enabled by sheer originality and analytical rigor, she creates and crosses bridges between previously unrelated ideas and paradigms, producing highly cited publications in top journals. One line of research demonstrated that object processing mechanisms relate to the physical size of objects in the world. Pioneering research on massive visual memory, Dr. Konkle also showed that detailed visual long-term memory retrieval is linked more to conceptual than perceptual properties.

Dr. Konkle’s productive laboratory is a vibrant training environment, attracting many graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. Dr. Konkle has also been actively involved in outreach activities devoted to promoting women and minorities in science.

From what things look like to what they are

Dr. Konkle will talk during the Awards Session
Monday, May 20, 2019, 12:30 – 1:45 pm, Talk Room 1-2

How do we see and recognize the world around us, and how do our brains organize all of this perceptual input? In this talk I will highlight some of the current research being conducted in my lab, exploring the representation of objects, actions, and scenes in the mind and brain.

 

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The Vision Sciences Society is honored to present Dr. Barbara Dosher with the 2019 Davida Teller Award

VSS established the Davida Teller Award in 2013. Davida was an exceptional scientist, mentor and colleague, who for many years led the field of visual development. The award is therefore given to an outstanding female vision scientist in recognition of her exceptional, lasting contributions to the field of vision science.

Barbara Dosher

Distinguished Professor, University of California, Irvine

Barbara Dosher is a researcher in the areas of visual attention and learning. She received her PhD in 1977 from the University of Oregon and served on the faculty at Columbia University (1977 – 1992) and the University of California, Irvine (1992 – present). Her early career investigated temporal properties of retrieval from long-term and working memory, and priming using pioneering speed-accuracy tradeoff methods. She then transitioned to work largely in vision, bringing some of the concepts of cue combination in memory to initiate work on combining cues in visual perception. This was followed by work to develop observer models using external noise methods that went on to be the basis for proposing that changing templates, stimulus amplification, and noise filtering were the primary functions of attention. This and similar work then constrained and motivated new generative network models of visual perceptual learning that have been used to understand the roles of feedback in unsupervised and supervised learning, the induction of bias in perception, and the central contributions of reweighting evidence to a decision in visual learning.

Barbara Dosher is an elected member of the Society for Experimental Psychologists and the National Academy of Sciences, and is a recipient of the Howard Crosby Warren Medal (2013) and the Atkinson Prize (2018).

Learning and Attention in Visual Perception

Dr. Dosher will speak during the Awards session
Monday, May 20, 2019, 12:30 – 1:45 pm, Talk Room 1-2.

Visual perception functions in the context of a dynamic system that is affected by experience and by top-down goals and strategies. Both learning and attention can improve perception that is limited by the noisiness of internal visual processes and noise in the environment. This brief talk will illustrate several examples of how learning and attention can improve how well we see by amplifying relevant stimuli while filtering others—and how important it is to model the coding or transformation of early features in the development of truly generative quantitative models of perceptual performance.

 

The Vision Sciences Society is honored to present Concetta Morrone with the 2019 Ken Nakayama Medal for Excellence in Vision Science.

The Ken Nakayama Medal is in honor of Professor Ken Nakayama’s contributions to the Vision Sciences Society, as well as his innovations and excellence to the domain of vision sciences.

The winner of the Ken Nakayama Medal receives this honor for high-impact work that has made a lasting contribution in vision science in the broadest sense. The nature of this work can be fundamental, clinical or applied.

Concetta Morrone

Professor of Physiology
Department of Translational Research on New
Technologies in Medicine and Surgery
University of Pisa

The brain architecture underlying our incredibly powerful and versatile visual system is best unravelled using multiple parallel approaches, including development, computational modelling, psychophysics, functional imaging and electrophysiology, in a truly interdisciplinary manner. This is the approach Concetta Morrone has adopted to understand how we segment visual scenes into functional objects, how the visual brain dynamically interacts with the motor system in crucial moments, such as eye-, head- and body-movements, how the brain plastically reorganizes itself for optimal visual processing during development and neuronal diseases. Concetta, in close collaboration with David Burr, has contributed to all these fundamental questions, introducing new concepts and verifying them quantitatively. There are various examples of this approach, including the reorganization of spatio-temporal receptive fields to retune the retinotopy of associative cortex on each saccade to mediate perceptual stability; the reorganization and change of specialization of associative cortex when primary visual pathways are damaged in hemianopia or blind-sight; the dynamic selection of salient spatial features by the Local Energy Model; and how the developing brain controls and calibrates dynamic reorganization and its residual capability in adulthood.

Concetta Morrone graduated in with a degree in Physics from the University of Pisa in 1977 and trained in Biophysics at the elite Scuola Normale Superiore from 1973 to 1980. Following research positions at the University of Western Australia, the Scuola Normale Superiore and the CNR Institute of Neuroscience in Pisa, she was appointed Professor of Psychophysiology in the Faculty of Psychology at the Università Vita-salute San Raffaele (Milan) in 2000. Since 2008, she has been a Professor of Physiology in the School of Medicine of the University of Pisa. In 2014 Concetta was elected a member of the Accademia dei Lincei, the Italian equivalent of the National Academy of Sciences or the Royal Society of London. In 2014 she was awarded an ERC-IDEA advanced grant, a distinction of excellence in Europe.

Dr. Morrone will speak during the Awards session
Monday, May 20, 2019, 12:30 – 1:45 pm, Talk Room 1-2.

Vision Sciences Society is honored to present Melissa Le-Hoa Võ with the 2018 Young Investigator Award.

The Young Investigator Award is an award given to an early stage researcher who has already made a significant contribution to our field. The award is sponsored by Elsevier, and the awardee is invited to submit a review paper to Vision Research highlighting this contribution.

Melissa Le-Hoa Võ

Professor of Cognitive Psychology, Goethe Universität Frankfurt; Head of the DFG-funded Emmy Noether Group, Scene Grammar Lab, Goethe Universität Frankfurt

Reading Scenes: How Scene Grammar Guides Attention and Perception in Real-World Environments

Dr. Võ will talk during the Awards Session
Monday, May 21, 2018, 12:30 – 1:30 pm, Talk Room 1-2

How do you recognize that little bump under the blanket as being your kid’s favorite stuffed animal? What no state-of-the-art deep neural network or sophisticated object recognition algorithm can do, is easily done by your toddler. This might seem trivial, however, the enormous efficiency of human visual cognition is actually not yet well understood.

Visual perception is much more than meets the eye. While bottom-up features are of course an essential ingredient of visual perception, my work has mainly focused on the role of the “invisible” determinants of visual cognition, i.e. the rules and expectations that govern scene understanding. Objects in scenes — like words in sentences — are arranged according to a “grammar”, which allows us to immediately understand objects and scenes we have never seen before. Studying scene grammar therefore provides us with the fascinating opportunity to study the inner workings of our mind as it makes sense of the world and interacts with its complex surroundings. In this talk, I will highlight some recent projects from my lab in which we have tried to shed more light on the influence of scene grammar on visual search, object perception and memory, its developmental trajectories, as well as its role in the ad-hoc creation of scenes in virtual reality scenarios. For instance, we found that so-called “anchor objects” play a crucial role in guiding attention and anchoring predictions about other elements within a scene, thereby laying the groundwork for efficient visual processing. This opens up exciting new avenues for investigating the building blocks of our visual world that our Scene Grammar Lab is eager to pursue.

Elsevier/Vision Research Article

Biography

Melissa Võ received her PhD from the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich in 2009. She then moved on to perform postdoctoral work, first with John Henderson at the University of Edinburgh, and then with Jeremy Wolfe at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Võ’s work has been supported by numerous grants and fellowships, including grants from the NIH and the German Research Council. In 2014, Melissa Võ moved back to Germany where as freshly appointed Full Professor for Cognitive Psychology she set up the Scene Grammar Lab at the Goethe University Frankfurt.

Dr. Võ is a superb scientist who has already had an extraordinary impact on our field. Her distinctive contribution has been to develop the concept of “scene grammar”, particularly scrutinizing the distinction between semantics and syntax in visual scenes. The distinction can be illustrated by considering scene components that are semantically incongruent (e.g. a printer in a kitchen) versus those that are syntactically incongruent (e.g. a cooking pot in a kitchen, floating in space rather than resting on a counter). Dr. Võ has used eye-tracking and EEG techniques in both children and adults to demonstrate that the brain processes semantic and syntactic visual information differentially, and has shown that scene grammar not only aids visual processing but also plays a key role in efficiently guiding search in real-world scenarios. Her work has implications in many areas, ranging from computer science to psychiatry. In addition to being a tremendously innovative and productive researcher, Dr. Võ is an active mentor of younger scientists and an award-winning teacher. Her outstanding contributions make her a highly worthy recipient of the 12th VSS Young Investigator Award.

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